>>> **Win95 is an operative system (no comment). **There is no DOS. >> Win95 is a desktop environment that lives on top of a MS-DOS 7.0 foundation. >> Win98SE is a desktop environment that lives on top of a MS-DOS 7.1 >> foundation. >> WinME " " " " " " "
> NO. It doesn't. People really should stop spewing that nonsense. 🙁 +1 > "MS-DOS 7.x" doesn't exist for all but the initial boot process. As soon > as the Windows 9x boot logo comes up, there is no longer any "MS-DOS > foundation" active. Read any Windows 9x undocumented/inside/etc book and > those will explain this in detail. If you open a DOS prompt from within > Windows 9x, it is not "DOS underneath" that is running, but Windows' > NTVDM process. The initial DOS kernel is no longer active. you are mostly, but not entirely right. what you describe was the intended behaviour, but that was a bit difficult in reality. like a) at least in the beginning, there existed SCSI drives without Win95 drivers where the DOS driver was loaded in CONFIG.SYS. Win95 tried to detect these disks by bouncing protected mode INT13 to real mode INT13. if this came back unchanged, the 32Bit code was used - as intended in the first place. But still 16 Bit drivers had a chance. b) programs doing direct I/O, like every COM handler *had* to do. this was entirely up to the DOS program, with no support from Win95. c) (from 25 years old memory) Andrew Schulman says that some task/PSP handling service is still done by DOS. I never found this interesting enough to verifiy this. But in the end, Win95 was the most stable DOS environment ever. Before, being a developer and doing interesting things, I would reboot my PC every few minutes of testing. on Win95, it would close my DosBox every few minutes, but continue running. > With Windows > ME, Microsoft all but eliminated this boot process and is more directly > loading and running the 32bit Windows kernel. this was the main difference to WindowsNT: how much it allowed 16Bit stuff to support, but also interfere with the OS. on Windows95: maybe on WindowsNT: not at all Tom _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
